Senator GRASSLEY. Yes, but I can't think of-you know, the sides that are sloping; what do we call those?

Anyway, when we open those to let that out and that dust goes away, are you charged for that dust that comes out of my wagon while I am unloading there and the wind is blowing through the unloading place?

Mr. O'CONNOR. Senator, the act requires that all emissions, regardless of source, be counted.

Senator GRASSLEY. That is what I want to say. Is that dust that comes out of my wagon at that point part of the dust that you have got to count?

Mr. KEITH. Yes, sir.

Senator GRASSLEY. And they are saying that you are supposed to be able to control that?

Mr. KEITH. Yes.

Mr. O'CONNOR. That is correct, Senator. The act not only says that you have to control it, but it says that you have to count it in the calculations, regardless of whether or not it really, in fact, is an airborne air pollutant.

Senator GRASSLEY. I was thinking of our gravity boxes, the kind of boxes we use with the side discharge.

Go ahead.

Mr. KEITH. The "potential to emit" formula requires that we calculate our emissions as if those 74 points were running wide open, which in our case is 1,257,680 bushels per hour, times 24 hours per day, which is 30,184,320 bushels per day, times 365 days per year, which equates to an astronomical figure of 11,017,276,800 bushels. Senator GRASSLEY. And we raise 10.3 billion bushels last year in the entire United States of corn.

Mr. KEITH. Right.

During the last 6 months of a record-harvest year, our facility actually handled 3.3 million bushels of grain, which is less than 0.03 percent of the total based upon EPA's "potential to emit" guidelines. Yet, the Clean Air Act would force us to calculate our potential to emit as if we handled more than the entire U.S. corn crop through our elevator at Mallard.

This is a display showing the entire U.S. corn crop going into one single facility.

For us and most other agribusinesses, calculating the potential to emit is absurd. Grain-handling equipment in Iowa country elevators is designed to move large volumes of grain very quickly. For example, this fall we completely filled our 3-million-bushel-capacity grain facility in 40 days. During the balance of the year, we will slowly empty our elevator as the grain goes into animal feed rations and is shipped to processors both here at home and abroad. Thus, my elevator at Mallard is not drawn into the Clean Air Act by actual emissions, but rather because of the "potential to emit" calculations. The Environmental Protection Agency says that we have the potential to emit over 1,000 tons of grain dust, but based upon EPA data our emissions are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 tons. Mr. Chairman, even this figure overstates the true emissions because we believe the EPA data upon which it is based is flawed.

Can anyone defend the "potential to emit" as a meaningful calculation for grain elevators? Before anyone thinks that 20 tons of dust is significant, they should stop and consider this reality check. Iowa is a State that relies on gravel roads for rural transportation. Anyone who has lived in Iowa or any rural area, for that matter, knows these gravel roads emit dust each time a vehicle drives over them. Using the formula that EPA requires businesses like ours to calculate dust emissions, let me illustrate a calculation of dust emissions from our rural road system for comparison.

On the average, which is 4 cars traveling over a 1-mile stretch of gravel road per hour, each mile of Iowa gravel road would actually-this isn't the potential; this is actual-emit 455 tons of dust over a period of a year. In other words, a single 1-mile stretch of gravel road would easily emit more dust in one year than 20 Iowa grain elevators, and Iowa has 69,000 miles of gravel roads and only 1,000 elevators.

Senator GRASSLEY. You don't want to remind EPA about this dust because 20 years ago EPA, under fugitive dust rules, tried to regulate fugitive dust which would have been the normal dust that comes up as we are tilling our soil, and they would have even included the county roads in the fugitive dust. The requirement was that you were supposed to be like God and be able to keep the dust within your property line. They actually tried to regulate that, so you shouldn't be surprised that they are trying to regulate you. I hope you haven't awakened their desire to regulate the dust on the road.

Mr. KEITH. Maybe I should strike that from my testimony. [Laughter.]

Senator GRASSLEY. My predecessor, John Culver, was a Senator from Iowa from 1974 to 1980, and even as a Democratic Member of the Congress he was fighting the fugitive dust rules. So if a liberal Democrat like him can fight these ridiculous rules, you know how bad they are.

Mr. KEITH. Help me understand why an insignificant source like our local agribusiness is saddled with this regulatory burden.

Lastly, we are not asking to be exempt from our obligation to meet national environmental goals. We continue to support reasonable and balanced regulation protective of the environment and those that work at our facilities. For example, the Occupational Safety and Health Act regulates workers' exposure to dust. Last year alone, our company spent over $12,000 in training and proper respiratory equipment for our employees, and they received nearly 1,400 hours of training on how to handle grain safely. Furthermore, our facility must limit visible emissions to comply with EPA standards for terminal grain elevators.

In closing, let me reiterate a key point of all this absurdity surrounding the "potential to emit" calculations for our industry. After we have spent a minimum of $20,000 per facility to complete the paperwork necessary to categorize us as a major source of emission, which in reality we actually are not, the exercise has done nothing to affect or minimize the amount of dust that is actually emitted into the air. The financial burden of completing this exercise will put many operations out of business. Clearly, it is time to bring common sense and a real-world perspective to the permitting proc

ess and base the permitting decision on what we actually emit, not the absurdity of our potential to emit.

I appreciate your time and attentiveness. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.

Senator GRASSLEY. Thank you for coming.

Did you have something you wanted to follow up with or are you here to answer questions?

Mr. O'CONNOR. I am just here to answer questions, Senator. Senator GRASSLEY. We will go to you now, sir. Would you please pronounce your last name for me?

STATEMENT OF SAL RISALVATO

Mr. RISALVATO. You were pretty close with it before. It is Risalvato.

Senator GRASSLEY. Okay.

Mr. RISALVATO. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me here today, although I have to tell you every time I come down to Washington now to do this, my blood pressure rises. I was here a few weeks ago to give similar testimony to a House committee and was appalled at some of the stories I heard there.

This past weekend, I just spent a beautiful weekend up in upper New York State snowmobiling, driving through beautiful farm country and thinking to myself, I should get out of the rat race, move up here to one of these beautiful farms with a beautiful silo like we just saw, and get away from government regulation.

Senator GRASSLEY. And you found out you can't get away from it anyplace.

Mr. RISALVATO. I am sitting here right now listening to Mr. Keith and I am so disappointed. You have ruined my new dream. Again, thank you very much for having me here. My name is Sal Risalvato. I own Riverdale Texaco in Riverdale, NJ. I have been in the service station business for 18 years, and I have seen over the years many regulations come and go, although most of them come and they never go, and they have affected my business in many ways and have cost me many dollars, some ggravation, and a lot of time.

I would like to make a number of points here this morning. I would like to spell out what regulation has cost me over the years and what it may cost me in the future. I would also like to explain what the benefit to both myself, my employees, and the economy in general would be if regulations were better thought out or never existed. I would also like to make you understand how some seemingly intelligent decisions are actually rendered stupid by government regulatory curve balls.

In making these three points about regulation, I would like to pay particular attention to the judicial review portion of S. 343. The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over a very important piece of regulatory legislation; that is, the Regulatory Flexibility Act, otherwise known as Reg Flex.

There is near unanimous, overwhelming bipartisan support for allowing judicial review or judicial enforcement of the Reg Flex Act, thereby giving the law teeth. Reg Flex was designed to force Federal bureaucrats to consider the special needs of small business

during the rulemaking process and to reduce the burdens on small business wherever possible.

Speaking as a small business owner who doesn't subscribe to the Federal Register, I think it is very important for small business owners like myself to have at least 2 years to challenge Reg Flex decisions, or lack of decisions, in court. Sixty or ninety days, even 6 months, is not long enough for a small business owner to understand the impact a regulation will have on their business and to challenge it in court.

Considering the problems that I have had with the EPA, a strong Reg Flex may have solved many of them, and I urge you to pass judicial review with at least a 2-year statute of limitations.

With that request, I would like to go on to explain to you how some regulations have affected me. In 1986, I had been in the service station business for 9 years. I was leasing my location and the real estate boom of the 1980's forced me out of my location. The owner of the property recognized the value as something other than a service station would be greater and asked me to leave; in fact, sold the property and kicked me out.

I spent a year looking for a new location, and back then the environmental issues were just starting to raise some turmoil with business owners. I was very, very particular about the location that I would select. In fact, I looked at over 80 locations in a year before selecting the location that I eventually purchased.

I made a $500,000 decision. I purchased a piece of property because I was never going to lease again after having the first experience. I purchased a piece of property that needed great repair to the building, to the property. It was virtually a junkyard. The business wasn't real good, but I knew the potential there; I knew what I could do there.

The attraction for me was the fact that the gasoline storage tanks were brand new. They were just put in prior to my purchase. I knew that I would not have any problems with the Environmental Protection Agency because I had new tanks. I was wrong. I paid more for this property because these tanks were new than I should have. I knew I was going to invest money into the business in terms of equipment, building renovations and expansions, and things like that. The sole purpose of selecting this location was because I knew I could expand, that any capital that I earned I could put into expansion.

Well, within 5 years, I have had to spend $95,000 to meet unexpected regulations that were brought by the EPA. There was no way that I could have foreseen any of these regulations. The figure of $95,000 presented a problem to me. I was left virtually penniless after losing my first business. I still owned the bank money because I had taken out a 10-year loan.

In order to come up with this money, I needed to borrow more money from family members. I was able to make a supply contract with the Texaco Oil Company that was willing to reimburse me for some of these expenditures, but I still had to come up with the capital to do that and it was very difficult. That is $95,000. Let's put that on the side.

The new regulations that are coming out of Washington are holding a gun to my head; they are holding a gun to the governor of

my State, Governor Whitman. They are holding a gun to her head. They are holding a gun to the head of the motorists of my State because they are not requiring that we completely revamp our inspection system as it relates to auto emissions.

I have a perfectly good, operating emissions analyzer. It cost $15,000 to purchase. The Environmental Protection Agency is now telling my State that that is not good enough. Not only is mine not good enough, but the ones that they are using in the State inspection lanes are not good enough. The State of New Jersey is going to have to spend millions of dollars and completely change the inspection system. We may have to eliminate the safety portion of the inspection, which is the class of the Nation.

We will have to, as small business people, invest anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 in new equipment to satisfy the Environmental Protection Agency, and we are going to change the inspection period from every year to every 2 years, so that now if a customer leaves my shop and I have tested his emissions and a week later the emissions system starts to operate improperly, a year from now we will pick that up. Under the new system, we are not going to pick that up for 2 years.

But, yet, they claim these new inspection machines are going to do a better job and clean up our air. The inspection equipment I have now does more than an adequate job. The expenditure that they are going to ask us to make is going to force a number of small business owners like myself to make the decision that they will no longer be in the inspection business because they are not going to be able to come up with the capital for the new equipment. That is going to further increase the lines of the motorists in New Jersey going to the State lanes.

So we have this problem in New Jersey, and we are talking about millions and millions of dollars and I am really not sure that we are going to have any cleaner air because of it.

How does that affect me? If we add those two figures together, that means that in this 7-year period the Federal Government, with the stroke of a pen, is forcing me to spend between $135,000 and maybe $200,000 to meet regulations in terms of what they have dictated I need in terms of equipment.

That has cost me dearly because when I purchased this location, remember, I wanted to expand it. I had visions of adding three service bays, offices. I am presently housed in an office trailer. When I went into this location, I asked the town fathers, because there was an ordinance against it, could I please put my office in a trailer. I had no room in the building.

I had every intention of expanding it and had even put some money into some aesthetic work around the location. The town was very pleased. They allowed me a temporary approval for an office trailer. I have been in that office for 5 years. I had every intention, within 2 years, to add on offices, service bays, storage, and employee rooms. I would have been able to employ at least four more full-timers.

Recently, the town asked me to come back before the Board of Adjustment and said, when are you removing the office trailer, and had to give me a further 2-year extension. Of course, the only reason they did was I explained to them all of the money that the Gov